Their fingers were laced, and their palms rubbed together with every step they took. Every few seconds, Buffy felt her eyes wander to their clasped hands, and warm butterflies filled her stomach. He was so close to her that a breath of air could not pass between them.
These patrol not-a-dates were the highlight of her day.
“So I’ve been thinkin’…”
Buffy’s head shot up. “You’re not going to try and talk me out of the plan, are you?” Because, at this point, I wouldn’t mind it if you gave it a shot. “Because the plan…is set in stone.” Really, really fragile stone. “Stone.”
Spike just grinned at her and shook his head. “No. I’m not gonna try an’ talk you outta the plan.”
That so wasn’t disappointment sliding down her spine. Really.
God, who am I kidding?
“Oh.” Buffy swallowed hard and forced a grin. “Okay. Then what is it that you’ve been thinking?”
“I don’ know if it makes sense for Dru to have cursed me because of infidelity issues.”
Gah. The butterflies were back. Maybe he was going to tell her that there was no curse. There was no spell. The pull between them was the natural force of attraction—pure attraction. Perhaps it was a vampire thing. Perhaps it was a slayer thing. And the only reason it hadn’t been there with Angel was that he wasn’t the one she was supposed to be with. The Powers had avoided giving her these feelings until she found Mr. Right. Because he was right. His scorned ex-girlfriend, psycho or not, cursing him to lust after another woman because she felt betrayed? Sense was so not with the making there.
Then again, it wasn’t as though her ephemeral flight of fancy had a ton of logic supporting it, either. Perhaps it was more the knowledge that her heart was in trouble, so her mind was looking for an out. A way to have Spike and not get hurt in the process.
That much made sense to her. Overactive Buffy brain, trying to override the rules of her own plan by providing escape hatches along the way. The fact of the matter was that her heart was going to end up in the shredder either way. Now she was split down the middle—panicking over her imminent heartbreak, and searching desperately for a way to keep Spike in her life.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “If it’s not Dru, then what—”
“Oh, I still think it’s Dru.”
No. That was not the sound of her heart screaming. That was the wind. “Oh. Okay.”
“She wouldn’t get back at me by giving me you, though. Truth of the matter is, I don’ think she cares very much.”
His tone surprised her. For as much the love of his unlife as Drusilla allegedly was, he didn’t give the impression of missing her, or caring that she didn’t care. Or hating her for leaving him. Or hating her for cursing him. Or hating her…period. Matter of fact, she didn’t detect any feeling whatsoever. It was as though he didn’t care about Dru at all.
That had to be wishful thinking. Of course he cared about Dru. He loved Dru. The second he was freed from being tied to her, he’d shake off whatever residual feelings this curse had given him and hop the first ship back to South America. Buffy would be lucky if he didn’t add insult to injury by trying to kill her first.
“So why would she curse us, then?” Buffy asked.
“I think it’s ‘cause you an’ I united to bring down her precious Angel.” Spike shrugged nonchalantly and lodged a cigarette between his lips. “She wanted to get back at us by makin’ us want each other bad.”
Buffy frowned. “So why give us the warm fuzzies to go along with it?”
Spike paused and glanced to her, smiling softly. “You have warm fuzzies over me?”
Guh. He was so gorgeous when he smiled like that. Okay, so he was pretty much gorgeous all the time. Being on the receiving end of his smile, though…there was nothing Buffy wouldn’t do to keep that smile aimed at her for the rest of her days.
“Well, I wouldn’t kick you out of bed for eating crackers,” she replied lamely.
“No. You kicked me outta bed because of some barmy plan.”
“Hey!” She pouted. “There will be no dissing of the plan!”
“Well, I gotta blame somethin’. You’ve had warm fuzzies about me, an’ you still managed to talk yourself into kickin’ me out of bed.” Spike shook his head and tsked. “Slayer, Slayer, Slayer. Whatever will I do with you?”
A good tongue-lashing oughta do the trick.
Buffy shivered. It was no wonder her heart was in such a perilous place, especially if these were the thoughts that kept her in check. “Well…I dunno if the warm fuzzies are just…me. Maybe Dru made it so—”
“No, sweetheart. They’re definitely not just you.”
Her face flamed and her heart swelled. “Oh.”
“I think she cast the spell thinkin’ that we’d go into this hatin’ each other. An’ maybe it was that at first.” Spike shrugged carelessly. “Don’ reckon I ever hated you.”
“You did.”
“Can’t seem to remember it.”
She shuddered again and squeezed his hand without thinking. “I do. And I remember…well, I remember a lot of things. Just a few days ago, you weren’t too wild with the idea of…well, me in general.”
Spike frowned and tossed her a wounded look. “I seem to recall makin’ up for that,” he replied. “At least, I tried.”
With sex. The last time we were supposed to have sex. Only we did it again after deciding on the plan. Oh, and again at the Bronze.
“Are you saying that the warm fuzzies aren’t generated from the spell, then?” Buffy asked, treading carefully. “Because if they are—”
“Doesn’ really make sense for Dru to get us panting over each other and enjoying it at the same time if it’s for revenge.”
She licked her lips. “So what you feel…the non-hatred, non-wanna-rip-your-throat-out stuff…that’s real?”
Spike domed a brow. “Wait,” he said, cigarette protruding from the corner of his mouth. “Those don’ count as warm fuzzies?”
Her insides flushed cold. “In so many ways,” Buffy retorted, jerking her hand from his, “bite me.”
“That literal, pet?”
“Spike—”
“Of course I’m feelin’ something. An’ gimme your hand back.” Before she could blink, he had her fingers curled around his again. “Do you really need me to spell it out for you?”
“Obviously, yes.”
“Well—”
Logical Buffy intervened before he could speak. Suppose he said something wonderful. Suppose she melted into slayer-goo, and suppose she took this new theory at face value. It was all well and good until they discovered that the theory was just that—a theory—and the true reasoning behind their behavior was something else. And then they were back to square one. As feasible as Spike’s hypothesis sounded, they had nothing with which to support it. She couldn’t let him trap her under the illusion that everything was so readily explainable. Not when her heart was very literally on the line.
“Spike, stop.” She sighed heavily and shook her head, squeezing his hand for support in spite of herself. “The fact of the matter is, we don’t know.”
“Huh?”
She shrugged and met his eyes helplessly. God, they were so incredibly blue. She could lose herself in his eyes. “We don’t know. As wonderfully simple as your…Dru idea is, we can’t know if it’s that or something else. It could be a thousand things. Of all the demons I’ve pissed off, of all the demons you’ve pissed off, the odds of us discovering the culprit on the first guess are slim to none.”
Spike was quiet for a minute. He tore his gaze from hers and focused on the ground between them, his demeanor reminding her of a pouting child. “Second guess,” he replied insolently.
“What?”
“My firs’ guess was over infidelity, which is laughable. Dru could give a fuck about me.” Again with the odd non-caring in his voice. She really, really couldn’t read too much into that. “An’ even if I cheated on her a thousand bloody times in my head, she was the one that actually went off to shag some slimy-antlered demon.”
“I still don’t get that.”
“She din’t like me thinking about you, pet, an’ I’ve done little else since you first barreled into my life.”
Buffy blinked, stunned. “What?”
Spike smiled softly. “Don’ look so surprised. Fact of the matter is, that was my second guess.”
She looked at him for a few more dazed seconds before forcing herself to break away with a resolute shake of her head. “No. It was the first guess modified. And even so, we don’t have anything but a guess to go off of. And so we’re back to the beginning.”
“What beginning?”
“The beginning of not knowing why we feel this way.” She held up a hand before he could interrupt her. “Can you honestly say you’re positive that, once this is over, you won’t want to kill me?”
“Yes.”
Buffy blinked again. “Huh?”
Spike shrugged and grinned slightly, puffing on his cigarette. “You asked, pet.”
“Well…I don’t know if I’m positive.”
“About wanting to kill me?”
“About you wanting to kill me.”
His eyes narrowed. “So you suddenly know my feelings better than I do?”
“That’s not what I said—”
“Funny. That’s exactly what it sounded like.”
Buffy shook her head. This was not at all how she’d wanted tonight to go. “Can’t we just—”
The roar pierced the air the second before her gut twinged with a delayed spider-sense, and in a blink, Buffy found herself torn from Spike as a thick, intrusively male body barreled her to the ground. Her head smacked against a headstone hard enough to make her dizzy but not enough to knock her out. The vampire on top of her was smelly and dirty—obviously newly risen—and he was eying her like she was the prime rib special.
Fledglings, she thought irritably, moving quickly to shove him off of her. He’d interrupted her…well, argument, but he’d still interrupted. And patrol not-a-date or not, she didn’t like disruptions while she was speaking.
Something funny happened when she tried to shove him off. Her strength was zapped. Incredibly zapped.
Oh God.
The thought was accentuated with a particularly brutal punch to her face. And it was then that her body registered the pain splitting through her veins.
“Word of advice,” Mr. Smelly snarled. “If you’re walking through a cemetery, don’t get into a loud argument with your boyfriend, hmmm?”
The weight was gone the next second. Buffy sat up, gasping, just in time to see Mr. Smelly smash into the wall of a mausoleum hard enough to crack the stone.
Spike was in game face, and he looked furious.
“Dude, you’re a vampire?” Mr. Smelly said in disgust, dusting himself off. “What gives? You weren’t eating her, so I thought she was fair game. I’ll just—”
In all her years, Buffy had never seen such a display of rage. Spike roared and lunged. He didn’t just kill the fledgling; he slaughtered him. He beat him until there was nothing left to beat. Until his hands were bruised and stained with the vampire’s blood. Until the air around him was flecked with red dust. And he roared the entire time.
He made the headstones shake with the sound of his fury.
It was monstrous. It was beautiful. And it was for her.
The second the fledgling was dust, Spike growled and ran to her, collapsing to his knees at her side. “Are you hurt?” he demanded, his hands everywhere at once. “Show me where you’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
“Buffy?”
“I’m okay,” she replied, but she didn’t feel it. Her head was spinning. Her muscles were flaccid. For the first time in four years, she felt completely powerless. “I…”
“You’re not okay,” Spike decided, lifting her into his arms. “What the fuck was that?”
“I got dizzy.”
“Is dizzy all? You’re not hurtin’, are you?” He met her eyes, and the wealth of concern burning through him warmed her insides. “You’re not hurtin’…in the way that only I can fix?”
She shook her head, but that made it worse. Her arms flew around his neck.
What is this? Why now?
“Spike…” she whimpered. “I’m…it’s all spinning.”
“I’m taking you home.”
“Spike?”
“I’m taking you home, Slayer.”
Her body protested. No, she didn’t want to go home. If she went home, the patrol non-date was over. She didn’t want it to be over. She wanted to stay out here with him. “It’ll pass.”
“Yes, an’ you’ll be home when it does.”
His tone told her that there was no arguing with him, so she gave up trying.
There was nothing to do but let Spike carry her home.
To be continued